Hamish Stephenson ’14 forges his own paths

The founder, CEO, and creative director of the London-based creative and production agency False 9, Hamish Stephenson ’14 has been doing things his own way since his ASL years. A longtime culture and sports fan turned photographer, director, and now businessperson, Hamish’s path—from shaping ASL publications to redefining the look and voice of brands and athletes around the world—has been defined by creative instincts and belief in himself. To learn how a Wiz Khalifa concert in Grade 9 spiraled into a successful creative career, read on.

“We had wolves on set—real wolves. We were in this huge film stage in downtown Los Angeles, and we had three different sets, motorbikes, and 30 extras, and a hundred-plus–person crew,” Hamish Stephenson ’14 says, recounting the day he directed Bryson Tiller’s 2017 music video for “Run Me Dry.”

The video is dimly lit but shot through with neon blues and reds, and its characters flash between a cozy bedroom and its high-static, retro television set; a bathroom mirror on cinderblock walls; a cavernous, industrial garage, where it sometimes rains; and the desolate banks of the Los Angeles River, where the revving wheels of a motorcycle send subtle plumes of dust into the night.

The last scene of the day was shot down by the river: also the site of countless iconic movie scenes, Hamish mentions, still slightly awestruck nearly 10 years later. The minute the shoot wrapped, he says, “I was just standing there, thinking, ‘What? Is this real? Did I just do that?’ The videos I used to dream about at school, I was suddenly making. I was 21 at the time.”

Seven years earlier, in 2011, Hamish was a Grade 9 student at ASL, and just getting into film and photography. A Photoshop class that Hamish took in Grade 8 as an after-school program had opened his eyes to the possibilities of digital art, and he was fascinated by all things culture and entertainment.

“My friends and I all loved Wiz Khalifa,” Hamish remembers—the song “Black and Yellow” had taken over the internet earlier that year. “There was a Wiz Khalifa concert at the O2 in Shepherd’s Bush, and we all bought tickets.” Hamish was following several music-focused YouTube channels at the time, and decided to go to the concert with a camera borrowed from ASL, film parts of it, and put the footage on YouTube.

“I think it was the first moment that I really got into it properly, and thought, ‘I could start turning this into something,’” Hamish remembers. “It was the first time I picked up a camera with a bit more intention.”

The concert was one of many that Hamish would go on to shoot in his early high school years. Inspired in part by a popular UK music channel, the late Jamal Edwards’s SBTV, Hamish set up a YouTube channel of his own, which soon turned into a space where, along with concert and festival footage, he could publish music videos he was starting to direct for small, local artists. 

“That one moment; that’s how I remember it,” Hamish says. “Being a freshman, and filming that Wiz Khalifa concert. It spiraled into something a bit more serious.”

Hamish came to ASL in 2002, at the start of Grade 1. His parents are both British—his father, Jonathan, is an art gallerist, and his mother, Lottie, is an academic who studies the history of education.

“I think I was a bit of a guinea pig,” Hamish laughs, speculating about why his parents chose to send him to an American school. “My mom was always fascinated by education: different educations; international educations. I think my parents only expected me to be at ASL for lower and middle school, and then go to sixth form,” Hamish says. But he loved the school and stayed through high school graduation, becoming an ASL lifer. (Hamish’s sister, Inez Stephenson ’26, will graduate this June and will also be a proud lifer.)

Hamish started down what he calls an “alternative route” around the time of the concert. “Even from Grade 9, I was spending lots of time working with music studios around London, and helping small, indie record labels with content. I carried on with that throughout high school.”

His teachers and advisors, Hamish remembers, were remarkably supportive. “I think they embraced the fact that I was going in this alternative direction.” He remembers being (pleasantly) surprised that he was granted extra free periods, in the latter half of high school, to spend editing photos, and thinks back on his classes—especially photography classes, and working on the Scroll in middle school and the Standard in high school—with real fondness. “From a photography and video perspective, too, the school was really generous in letting me use and borrow equipment, and helping me to explore that interest,” Hamish says.

In Grade 9, Hamish started posting on Gumtree (think British Craigslist), offering to shoot music videos for £20. “I was trying to do as much as possible: just exploring, and trying to understand production and content,” he says. The summer before Grade 10 in particular, Hamish recalls, lots of locals reached out through Gumtree, saying, “‘Wow, yes, let’s make a music video.’”

“It was a very organic curve,” says Hamish. Over the course of high school, he went from making videos alone on a hand-held camera, to filming his first music video in a studio for an independent artist called Cherri V, to shooting a video for a major UK rapper. From there, he says, he felt like he was in an entirely different ballgame. “Now all the big labels and artists, even in the US, will consider you as a director for their music videos.’” He had gone from lighting, shooting, and post-producing each video himself, to working with cinematographers, lighting technicians, color grading specialists, and editing teams—and sometimes many more.

While continuing to build out his music video portfolio, Hamish had also started working in photography, mostly for local fashion labels. The photography work was “much easier to monetize” than the production-intensive video work, and, in one especially memorable—and high-clout—instance in 2014, it led to an Instagram follow from Rihanna, who had seen one of the photo shoots he did for a collab between PUMA and the streetwear brand Trapstar London.

After graduating from ASL in 2014, Hamish and his friends took a celebratory trip to Mauritius. When he returned to London, he vividly remembers the shock of sitting alone, quiet, in a studio space in his father’s gallery, thinking, “‘Holy smokes. This is it: this is real life.’”

Most of Hamish’s friends and classmates were still on various vacations, and nearly everyone had four or five years of schooling still spread out ahead of them before they had to start thinking about their careers. But out of nowhere, Hamish says, “I was sitting there, in mid-July, thinking, ‘I need to work. I need to make content. I need to network and find opportunities and make money now—this is it. Let’s go.’”

False 9, which Hamish cofounded in 2020 and still leads today, serving as both creative director and CEO, is a creative and production agency that partners with sports teams and ventures, fashion labels, and cultural tastemakers to tell their stories and engage fans—always in sleek, eye-candy style. 

Recent clients include Arsenal F.C., Jameson Irish Whiskey, PUMA Running, the London Lions basketball club, and more; False 9’s Instagram page, accordingly, is a dazzling array of influential people having fun and working out—sometimes, though not always—at the same time.

Before there was False 9, there was Gaffer, a magazine and media platform that blended football, fashion, and culture at large. (“Gaffer,” for the uninitiated, is the British term for a football—soccer—team manager.) Hamish cofounded Gaffer alongside a football agent friend of his in 2019, after a few years of occasional sports photography—alongside his work in fashion and music—led Hamish to want to do more within athletics.

“I was doing a lot of the photography, but I was also creative directing the magazine in the same way I had creative directed The Standard, funnily enough,” Hamish says of his time at Gaffer. (As a Grade 12 Standard staffer, Hamish had actually proposed the term “creative director” to describe his role on the paper, and it was authorized by the editorial powers above.)

Very quickly, starting a creative agency to serve as Gaffer’s “sister business” seemed to make sense to the cofounders: “It meant that if a brand approached us and wanted to do a partnership, we could either do it as a brand partnership on the platform, or direct them to the agency instead, and say, ‘We might not do this as a brand partnership, but let us help you make this style of content, because you obviously appreciate the kind of content we’re making.’”

And so False 9 was born only a year into Gaffer, and eventually, Hamish says, he was no longer doing the bulk of the photography and video work himself. “I drifted more into the role of creative director, and then, ultimately, ‘business person.’”

“‘False 9’ is also a football term,” Hamish explains. “It’s a creative player on the pitch who drifts between spaces. They are primarily an attacker, but they will drop into the midfield to help create plays.” False 9 the agency, which weaves nimbly between cultural realms, was doing something similar. 

By the end of 2022, Hamish was in charge of False 9, while his Gaffer cofounder had a new vision for the magazine. The pair made the (harmonious) decision to separate the two businesses. “I left Gaffer and kept running False 9, which was more of the ‘business,’ but it meant somewhat detaching from that more creative outlet, which was sad—but it made a lot of sense.”

“The journey of learning to be a photographer and director was very beautiful,” Hamish says. “I look back on it in an almost romantic way… There’s a bit of nostalgia.” The learning curve for becoming a business person, by contrast, has felt steep and blunt, and stakes feel higher with other people’s livelihoods on the line. 

“As a photographer and director, sometimes I would get thrown into crazy projects, and always had impostor syndrome, but I would just have to learn on the go and work it out,” says Hamish. “The similarity here is that those high stakes and risk force you to learn quicker. You have to dial it in, and find a way to get it done.”

As Hamish approaches 30, he finds that the business aspects of his work have taken on a relatively higher importance, for him, than they once held. “There’s definitely a journey of growing up and realizing that you want to sustain a lifestyle, and be successful on a financial level,” he says. Outside of work, he doesn’t do as much photography and videography for fun as he used to. For the most part, that feels too close to work, which is fairly all-consuming as it is.

“Something I’ve been pondering more recently is what other creative outlets I could spend more time on,” says Hamish, who recently discovered an interest in furnishing apartments. “When I moved at the start of last year, it was a real creative process that was so removed from work, and so enjoyable—designing how a space looks, and imagining how the photography of that space might look, and then taking some photos of it when it’s done.”

His apartment, he confirms, bears no resemblance to False 9’s aesthetic. “The work is very sporty and commercial,” Hamish muses. “But I, as a person, am a very different vibe. I still love sports, but in a home, I’m thinking a lot more about organic materials, a softer color palette, sheepskins…”

Ten years ago, Hamish was also always wearing the same sorts of streetwear he was building a life and career photographing. Now, not so much. “Personal style–wise, I’ve drifted away from the streetwear stuff and toward more refined and mature clothes; more vintage,” says Hamish. “I used to feel like a reflection of the business, and felt I had to embody and embrace the worlds we were operating in from a business perspective.”

He is still as passionate about his work as he was when he graduated ASL, and continues to dream up new ways to build upon False 9—but his relationship to that work has shifted. The pressure for his life and style to mirror his work, and vice versa, has eased. “It’s nice to have that disconnect,” Hamish reflects.